Synopsis

A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected.

Ernest J. Gaines brings to this novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have unformed his previous, highly praised works of fiction.

Excerpt

I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there. Either I sat behind my aunt and his godmother or I sat beside them. Both are large women, but his godmother is larger. She is of average height, five four, five five, but weighs nearly two hundred pounds. Once she and my aunt had found their places--two rows behind the table where he sat with his court-appointed attorney--his godmother became as immobile as a great stone or as one of our oak or cypress stumps. She never got up once to get water or go to the bathroom down in the basement. She just sat there staring at the boy's clean-cropped head where he sat at the front table with his lawyer. Even after he had gone to await the jurors' verdict, her eyes remained in that one direction. She heard nothing said in the courtroom. Not by the prosecutor, not by the defense attorney, not by my aunt. (Oh, yes, she did hear one word--one word, for sure: "hog.") It was my aunt whose eyes followed the prosecutor as he moved from one side of the courtroom to the other, pounding his fist into the palm of his hand, pounding the table where his papers lay, pounding the rail that separated the jurors from the rest of the courtroom. It was my aunt who followed his every move, not his godmother. She was not even listening. She had gotten tired of listening, She knew, as we all knew, what the outcome would be. A white man had been killed during a robbery, and though two of the robbers had been killed on the spot, one had been captured, and he, too, would have to die. Though he told them no, he had nothing to do with it, that he was on his way to the White Rabbit Bar and Lounge when Brother and Bear drove up beside him and offered him a ride. After he got into the car, they asked him if he had any money. When he told them he didn't have a solitary dime, it was then that Brother and Bear started talking credit, saying that old Gropé should not mind crediting them a pint since he knew them well, and he knew that the grinding season was coming soon, and they would be able to pay him back then.

The store was empty, except for the old storekeeper, Alcee Gropé, who sat on a stool behind the counter. He spoke first. He asked Jefferson about his godmother. Jefferson told him his nannan was all right. Old Gropé nodded his head. "You tell her for me I say hello," he told Jefferson. He looked at Brother and Bear. But he didn't like them. He didn't trust them. Jefferson could see that in his face. "Do for you boys?" he asked. "A bottle of that Apple White, there, Mr. Gropé" Bear said. Old Gropé got the bottle off the shelf, but he did not set it on the counter. He could see that the boys had already been drinking, and he became suspicious. "You boys got money?" he asked. Brother and Bear spread out all the money they had in their pockets on top of the counter. Old Gropé counted it with his eyes. "That's not enough," he said. "Come on, now, Mr. Gropé," they pleaded with him. "You know you go'n get your money soon as grinding start." "No," he said. "Money is slack everywhere. You bring the money, you get your wine." He turned to put the bottle back on the shelf. One of the boys, the one called Bear, started around the counter."You, stop there," Gropé told him. "Go back." Bear had been drinking, and his eyes were glossy, he walked unsteadily, grinning all the time as he continued around the counter. "Go back," Gropé told him. "I mean, the last time now--go back." Bear continued. Gropé moved quickly toward the cash register, where he withdrew a revolver and started shooting. Soon there was shooting from another direction. When it was quiet again, Bear, Gropé, and Brother were all down on the floor, and only Jefferson was standing.

He wanted to run, but he couldn't run. He couldn't even think. He didn't know where he was. He didn't know how he had gotten there. He couldn't remember ever getting into the car. He couldn't remember a thing he had done all day.

He heard a voice calling. He thought the voice was coming from the liquor shelves. Then he realized that old Gropé was not dead, and that it was he who was calling. He made himself go to the end of the counter. He had to look across Bear to see the storekeeper. Both lay between the counter and the shelves of alcohol. Several bottles had broken, and alcohol and blood covered their bodies as well as the floor. He stood there gaping at the old man slumped against the bottom shelf of gallons and half gallons of wine. He didn't know whether he should go to him or whether he should run out of there. The old man continued to call: "Boy? Boy? Boy?" Jefferson became frightened. The old man was still alive. He had seen him. He would tell on him. Now he started babbling. "It wasn't me. It wasn't me, Mr. Gropé. It was Brother and Bear. Brother shot you. It wasn't me. They made me come with them. You got to tell the law that, Mr. Gropé. You hear me Mr. Gropé?"

But he was talking to a dead man.

Still he did not run. He didn't know what to do. He didn't believe that this had happened. Again he couldn't remember how he had gotten there. He didn't know whether he had come there with Brother and Bear, or whether he had walked in and seen all this after it happened.

He looked from one dead body to the other. He didn't know whether he should call someone on the telephone or run. He had never dialed a telephone in his life, but he had seen other people use them. He didn't know what to do. He was standing by the liquor shelf, and suddenly he realized he needed a drink and needed it badly. He snatched a bottle off the shelf, wrung off the cap, and turned up the bottle, all in one continuous motion. The whiskey burned him like fire--his chest, his belly, even his nostrils. His eyes watered; he shook his head to clear his mind. Now he began to realize where he was. Now he began to realize fully what had happened. Now he knew he had to get out of there. He turned. He saw the money in the cash register, under the little wire clamps. He knew taking money was wrong. His nannan had told him never to steal. He didn't want to steal. But he didn't have a solitary dime in his pocket. And nobody was around, so who could say he stole it? Surely not one of the dead men.

He was halfway across the room, the money stuffed inside his jacket pocket, the half bottle of whiskey clutched in his hand, when two white men walked into the store.

That was his story.

The prosecutor's story was different. The prosecutor argued that Jefferson and the other two had gone there with the full intention of robbing the old man and killing him so that he could not identify them. When the old man and the other two robbers were all dead, this one--it proved the kind of animal he really was--stuffed the money into his pockets and celebrated the event by drinking over their still-bleeding bodies.

The defense argued that Jefferson was innocent of all charges except being at the wrong place at the wrong time. There was absolutely no proof that there had been a conspiracy between himself and the other two. The fact that Mr. Gropé shot only Brother and Bear was proof of Jefferson's innocence. Why did Mr. Gropé shoot one boy twice and never shoot at Jefferson once? Because Jefferson was merely an innocent bystander. He took the whiskey to calm his nerves, not to celebrate. He took the money out of hunger and plain stupidity.

"Gentlemen of the jury, look at this--this--this boy. I almost said man, but I can't say man. Oh, sure, he has reached the age of twenty-one, when we, civilized men, consider the male species has reached manhood, but would you call this--this--this a man? No, not I. I would call it a boy and a fool. A fool is not aware of right and wrong. A fool does what others tell him to do. A fool got into that automobile. A man with a modicum of intelligence would have seen that those racketeers meant no good. But not a fool. A fool got into that automobile. A fool rode to the grocery store. A fool stood by and watched this happen, not having the sense to run.

"Gentlemen of the jury, look at him--look at him--look that this. Do you see a man sitting here? I ask you, I implore, look carefully--do you see a man sitting here? Look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand--look deeply into those eyes. Do you see a modicum of intelligence? Do you see anyone here who could plan a murder, a robbery, can plan--can plan--can plan anything? A cornered animal to strike quickly out of fear, a trait inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa--yes, yes, that he can do--but to plan? To plan, gentlemen of the jury? No, gentlemen, this skull here holds no plans. What you see here is a thing that acts on command. A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable of planning a robbery or a murder. He does not even know the size of his clothes or his shoes. Ask him to name the months of the year. Ask him does Christmas come before or after the Fourth of July? Mention the names of Keats, Byron, Scott, and see whether the eyes will show one moment of recognition. Ask him to describe a rose, to quote one passage from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Gentlemen of the jury, this man planned a robbery? Oh, pardon me, pardon me, I surely did not mean to insult your intelligence by saying 'man'--would you please forgive me for committing such an error?

"Gentlemen of the jury, who would be hurt if you took this life? Look back to that second row. Please look. I want all twelve of you honorable men to turn your heads and look back to that second row. What you see there has been everything to him--mama, grandmother, godmother--everything. Look at her, gentlemen of the jury, look at her well. Take this away from her, and she has no reason to go on living. We may see him as not much, but he's her reason for existence. Think on that, gentlemen, think on it.

"Gentlemen of the jury, be merciful. For God's sake, be merciful. He is innocent of all charges brought against him.

"But let us say he was not. Let us for a moment say he was not. What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen,? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

"I thank you, gentlemen, from the bottom of my heart, for your kind patience. I have no more to say, except this: We must live with our own conscience. Each and every one of us must live with his own conscience."

The jury retired, and it returned a verdict after lunch: guilty of robbery and murder in the first degree. The judge commended the twelve white men for reaching a quick and just verdict. This was Friday. He would pass sentence on Monday.

Ten o'clock on Monday, Miss Emma and my aunt sat in the same seats they had occupied on Friday. Reverend Mose Ambrose, the pastor of their church, was with them., He and my aunt sat on either side of Miss Emma. The judge, a short, red-faced man with snow-white hair and thick black eyebrows, asked Jefferson if he had anything to say before the sentencing. My aunt said that Jefferson was looking down at the floor and shook his head. The judge told Jefferson that he had been found guilty of the charges brought against him, and that the judge saw no reason that he should not pay for the part he played in this horrible crime.

About Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest Gaines is a writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying was an Oprah Book Club pick in 1997.

Praise|Awards

Praise

"This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives."- Chicago Tribune

"A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer."- Boston Globe

"Enormously moving... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes."- Los Angeles Times

Awards

WINNER YALSA Best Books for Young AdultsWINNER National Book Critics Circle Awards

Reader's Guide|About the Book|Discussion Questions|Teachers Guide

About the Book

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. We hope that they will provide you with multiple ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel whose eloquence, thematic richness, and moral resonance have called forth comparisons to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. In a story so simple that it might be a lost parable from the Gospels, Gaines has compressed the entire bitter history of black people in the South--and, by extension, in America as a whole.

About the Guide

A Lesson Before Dying is about the ways in which people insist on declaring the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. As such, Gaines's novel transcends its minutely evoked circumstances to address the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being, a creature striving for dignity in a universe that often denies it.

Discussion Guides

1. All the characters in A Lesson Before Dying are motivated by a single word: "hog." Jefferson's attorney has compared him to a hog; Miss Emma wants Grant to prove that her godson is not a hog; and Jefferson at first eats the food she has sent him on his knees, because "that's how a old hog eat." How are words used both to humiliate and to redeem the characters in this novel?

2. . Grant's task is to affirm that Jefferson is not a hog, but a man. The mission is doubly difficult because Grant isn't sure he knows what a man is. What definition of manhood, or humanity, does A Lesson Before Dying provide? Why is manhood a subversive notion within the book's milieu?

3. At various points in the book Gaines draws analogies between Jefferson and Jesus. One of the first questions Jefferson asks his tutor concerns the significance of Christmas: "That's when He was born, or that's when he died?" Jefferson is executed eight days after Easter. In what other ways is this parallel developed? In particular, discuss the scriptural connotations of the word "lesson."

4. For all the book's religious symbolism, the central character is a man without faith. Grant's refusal to attend church has deeply hurt his aunt and antagonized Reverend Ambrose, whose religion Grant at first dismisses as a sham. Yet at the book's climax he admits that Ambrose "is braver than I," and he has his pupils pray in the hours before Jefferson's death. What kind of faith does Grant acquire in the course of this book? Why does the Reverend emerge as the stronger of the two men?

5. One of the novel's paradoxes is that Ambrose's faith--which Grant rejects because it is also the white man's--enables him to stand up against the white man's "justice." How do we resolve this paradox? How has faith served African-Americans as a source of personal empowerment and an axis of communal resistance?

6. Grant believes that black men in Louisiana have only three choices: to die violently, to be "brought down to the level of beasts," or "to run and run." How does the way in which Gaines articulates these grim choices--and suggests an alternative to them--make A Lesson Before Dying applicable not only to Louisiana in 1948 but to the United States in the 1990s?

7. Women play a significant role in the book. Examine the scenes between Grant and Tante Lou, Grant and Vivian, and Jefferson and Miss Emma, and discuss the impetus that Gaines's women provide his male characters. In what ways do these interactions reflect the roles of black women within their families and in African-American society?

8. A Lesson Before Dying is concerned with obligation and commitment. Discuss this theme as it emerges in the exchanges between Emma Glenn and the Pichots, Grant and Vivian, and Grant and the Reverend Ambrose. What are the debts these people owe each other? In what ways do they variously try to honor, evade, or exploit them?

9. Like Faulkner and Joyce, Gaines has been acclaimed for his evocation of place. In A Lesson Before Dying his accomplishment is all the more impressive because of the book's brevity. What details in this book evoke its setting, and what is the relation between its setting and its themes?

10. From the manslaughter that begins this novel to the judicial murder at its close, death is a constant presence in A Lesson Before Dying. We are repeatedly reminded of all the untimely, violent deaths that have preceded Jefferson's and, in all likelihood, will follow it. Why then is Jefferson's death so disturbing to this book's black characters, and even to some of its white ones? What does Jefferson's death accomplish that his life could not?

Teacher's Guide

NOTE TO TEACHERS

To an interviewer's question about the audience that Gaines hoped to reach, the author responded, "I write for the African-American youth in the country, especially the South, so that they can know who they are and where they came from and take pride in it.... [And for] the white youth of this country, and especially the South, because unless he knows his neighbor of three hundred years, he only knows half his history." The questions and topics that follow are designed for in-class discussion and written or oral assignments, to guide your students through A Lesson Before Dying and to help them approach the novel as a fully realized work of fiction that presents characters and themes recurrent in American literature and, at the same time, of intense relevance in the world of the 1990s. How can we preserve what is good of the past while destroying or transforming all that is evil, unjust, and demeaning? How do we balance the demands of society, family, and self? Can one person effect change in a society in which traditional ways of behavior are firmly entrenched? How does one balance conflicting loyalties? How does one preserve one's convictions and personal beliefs in the face of constant attack and struggle?

While racism and the continuing degradation of prejudice are clearly at the novel's forefront, students should also be encouraged to consider the book's other issues and concerns: love and redemption; the pursuit of personal happiness; community values; the nature of religious belief; social dynamics and conventions; justice and the death penalty; familial relationships; familial and social responsibility, for example. They should also be encouraged to examine their own lives and society with a critical eye tempered by the carefully balanced amalgam of compassion, acceptance, and commitment to change that informs A Lesson Before Dying. They should keep journals in which they record their responses to the novel, their responses to specific questions in this guide, and their observations on their own lives, those of their families, and their communities.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Ernest J. Gaines's award-winning novel is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins has returned home from college to the plantation school to teach children whose lives promise to be not much better than Jefferson's. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected.

In a story whose eloquence, thematic richness, and moral resonance have called forth comparisons to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner, Gaines summons the reader to confront the entire bitter history of black people in the South—and, by extension, America as a whole. A Lesson Before Dying is about the ways in which people declare the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives seemingly count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. Gaines's novel transcends its minutely evoked circumstances to address the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being, a creature striving for dignity in a universe that often denies it.

The world into which Ernest James Gaines was born—on January 15, 1933—is essentially the world which he has distilled into the dense and complex world of his six novels and his stories. The land around River Lake Plantation—near New Roads, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana—is the land around the Pichot plantation, near Bayonne, St. Raphael Parish, presented in A Lesson Before Dying. The black community in which Gaines grew up became "the quarter" of this 1993 novel, as well as providing the setting and social matrix of his previous works. The author's vision of Henri Pichot's cane fields stems directly from the fields in which Gaines himself worked as a child. As Gaines has said: "Though the places in my stories and novels are imaginary ones, they are based pretty much on the place where I grew up and the surrounding areas where I worked, went to school and traveled as a child. My characters speak the way the people speak in that area. They do the work that the people do there. Since most of my writing is about rural Louisiana, my characters are closely attached to the land." And that land provides the bedrock of a plantation world that is truly microcosmic, existing in and of itself—through the power of Gaines's creative power—and exemplifying southern Louisiana, the South, and the nation itself.

Gaines's fictive world and specific technical aspects of his works have been compared with those of William Faulkner, resemblances being remarked between the latter's Yoknapatawpha County and Gaines's plantation country. Comparisons have also been made between Gaines and other Southern writers. Gaines has insisted, however, that his presentation of his characters owes much more to Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the other great nineteenth-century Russian writers. To whatever extent Gaines's complex social hierarchy and his portraits of those who benefit from and fall prey to that hierarchy may be compared with either Faulkner's or Tolstoy's, he has created a world and characters that are exclusively and gloriously his.

Gaines also has drawn considerably on the mores of black culture and the storytelling traditions of rural Louisiana. The result is a prose that is at once exact, idiomatic, stately, and true to the spoken language of actual people. The serenity and epic rhythms of Gaines's prose contain and highlight the often anguished experiences and emotions of his characters. Of particular note in Gaines's novels and stories is his fidelity to a community's (black and white) shared ways of speaking and thinking in response to a firmly rooted history, persisting conventions, and the threat or promise of change.

A Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the most recent of numerous awards that Gaines has received. A Wallace Stegner fellow in 1957, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), a Guggenheim fellow (1971), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow (1993), Mr. Gaines has steadily been recognized for his achievement as a master of the novel and short story. In addition, one of his novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), has become an undisputed classic of twentieth-century American literature and gave rise to the immensely popular, award-winning TV-movie adaptation starring Cicely Tyson.

DISCUSSION AND WRITING

Structure, Teaching, and Plot

1. What is the pattern of point of view and focus from chapter to chapter? Is there a correspondence or symmetry among the chapters or among groups of chapters?

2. Why does Gaines begin the novel with Jefferson's trial, verdict, and sentencing but without providing the specific names of any of those involved? Does this presentation predispose us to accept what follows in a specific way?

3. What is the effect of the story's being presented (except for two instances near the novel's end) through the mind and voice of Grant Wiggins? Can Grant's narrative be relied upon, or must we look beyond him for a full understanding of the novel's action?

4. Chapters 29 and 30 constitute the two instances in which material is presented from points of view other than Grant's. Why does Gaines move away from Grant's point of view in these two penultimate chapters?

5. In several instances, as at the beginning of Chapter 13, the narrative jumps ahead in time and Grant relates events or episodes in flashback. Why are these events and episodes not presented directly as part of the ongoing narrative?

6. Is the time sequence of the novel—from late October to early April (two weeks after Easter)—of particular significance? Why is there a jump of two months, from just before Christmas to late February, between Chapters 19 and 20? Does the novel consist of two groups of chapters: Chapters 1-19 culminating in the Christmas season; Chapters 20-31 culminating in the Easter season? What are the implications of such a structure?

7. In Chapter 4, Grant poses several questions to Vivian regarding his assignment from Miss Emma and Tante Lou. Are these questions ever answered? If so, are they answered in ways that are anticipated or unanticipated?

9. In Chapter 26, Vivian confronts Grant with a series of questions. What are the context and import of these questions?

10. In Chapter 28, Jefferson asks Grant a series of questions. What is the import of these questions and of Jefferson's posing them at this point in the novel? Do these questions have any answers?

11. What does Grant learn—and with what effect on his outlook and sense of himself—about himself and others, about his community, about the nature of belief, and about the possibilities for change and improvement? [See pp. 166Ð 67.]

12. What ironies are implicit in the fact that the uneducated, deprived, barely literate, condemned victim becomes the focus of the dreams, aspirations, and desires of all the other characters?

13. To which character or characters does the "lesson" of the novel's title apply? Does more than one lesson emerge in the course of the novel? Why is the title of the book not "Lessons Before Dying"?

Character and Conflict

1. How would you characterize Grant Wiggins's relationships with, attitude toward, and behavior with each of the other main characters, black and white? What does each of these relationships reveal about Grant and about the racially structured society in which he lives?

2. How would you characterize the relationships among the novel's other main characters?

3. Does Paul Bonin's behavior vis-a-vis Jefferson and Grant—in contrast to that of Clarke—signify an improvement in white attitudes toward blacks from one generation to another? What is the significance, in Chapter 17 (exactly halfway through the novel), of Paul's introducing himself to Grant by his full name and, at the very end of the novel, extending his hand in friendship and the offer of assistance?

4. Why do Miss Emma and Tante Lou, in Chapter 17, go to the sheriff's wife with their request rather than directly to the sheriff himself? Is there a protocol that requires the black characters to address certain requests to white women and others to white men?

5. What are the purpose, effect, and social context of Miss Emma's reminding Henri Pichot and Mrs. Guidry of all that she has done for their families over the years?

6. What do Jefferson's diary entries (Chapter 29) reveal about him, before and after his trial, and about his understanding of his and his fellow blacks' lives and their relationships with whites, and of his own fate? Can this chapter be seen as a summing up of the main themes and the main action of the novel?

7. Do Tante Lou, Miss Emma, and Vivian represent positive qualities that are exclusive to the black women of the quarter? Do any black men in the novel share these qualities? Does Grant himself take on any of Tante Lou's and Miss Emma's qualities by the end of the novel?

8. Why do Miss Emma and Tante Lou insist that Grant visit Jefferson in the parish jail and teach him how to die like a man? Why don't they rely solely on Reverend Ambrose?

9. How would you characterize Grant's approach to and treatment of his students in the early chapters? Does his treatment of them change in the course of the novel?

10. At the end of Chapter 12, Vivian offers to Grant an explanation of his not "running away." Is her explanation just? What does her explanation reveal about her and about her understanding of Grant and of his situation?

11. What conflicts are at work in the novel? How do they provide a context for, or shape the decisions and actions of, the characters?

12. What are the terms and implications of the conflict between what Jefferson wants before he dies and what each of the others wants for and of him? How is this conflict related to the novel's other dominant conflicts?

13. Jefferson's final spoken words to Grant, at the end of Chapter 28, are "I'm all right, Mr. Wiggins." What is the full impact of that statement?

14. In Chapter 27, what does the conversation between Reverend Ambrose and Grant reveal about each and about the lives of their people? Are Reverend Ambrose's accusations true and just? Is he justified in lying to his congregation, as he admits he has done over the years? What levels of meaning and import are established in this dialogue?

Setting and Society

1. What details does Gaines provide to establish the identity and significance of the quarter and its history, the plantation, Bayonne, and the surrounding county?

3. Citing specific characters or groups of characters as illustrations, can you map the society of the novel? How is the social world of the novel structured? What and who determines that structure? How do various blacks and whites claim, sanction, and enforce these social strata?

4. In Chapter 6, why does Pichot keep Grant waiting for "nearly two and a half hours"? Why does Grant wait? What does this scene reveal about the relationships among blacks and whites in Louisiana, the South, and the nation in the late 1940s?

5. How does Gaines provide a sense of the lives and work of the people of the quarter, of their living conditions, and of their activities? What is the range of their activities and their lives?

6. What elements of setting are emphasized? Are these elements presented in and of themselves, as contributing to a sense of setting, or in association with specific characters or groups of characters?

7. What is the significance of the name of the Rainbow Club?

8. How does Gaines establish the unchanging ways of the two communities, black and white? What details of individual lives and of communal life contribute to the lack of change?

9. In Chapter 3, Grant notices that some things in Pichot's house have changed since he—Grant—was last there as a boy, and that some things have not changed. What has changed and what has not? Does Grant's observation take in material objects only? Are there other instances in which Grant calls our attention to things that have changed or remained the same?

10. How does the layout of Bayonne correspond with that of the plantation and with the structure of society in St. Raphael Parish?

11. More than once, in connection with a kindness or word of understanding from Paul Bonin, Grant comments that Paul "had come from good stock." What does he mean by that and does it adequately explain Paul's behavior?

Themes and Motifs

1. What are the dominant themes of the novel and how are they worked out in terms of the characters and their words and actions?

2. What issues of justice and civil rights are raised by Jefferson's trial, imprisonment, and execution? How do these issues relate to the wider issue of capital punishment?

3. What does the remarkable attendance at the school's Christmas program indicate about the quarter's attitude toward Jefferson and his situation, and about their own lives?

4. What small, specific actions and expressions of the white characters reveal their deep-seated racism (e.g., the sheriff's not asking Miss Emma and Tante Lou to sit in the two empty chairs in his office, in Chapter 23).

5. Identify as many as possible of the small, specific actions and expressions of the black characters that reveal their attitudes toward whites and their historically enforced conventions of behavior toward whites.

6. What is the nature of the conflict between Grant and Reverend Ambrose (in terms of Jefferson, Grant's nonbelief, what each sees as best for his community, and so on)? What objects and actions seem to focus or crystallize this conflict [pp. 217ff.]?

7. Is Grant a hero, according to the definition he gives Jefferson in Chapter 24 [pp. 191Ð92]? Is Jefferson a hero? Do any of the other characters qualify as heroes according to Grant's definition?

8. To what extent does Grant see Jefferson and his fate as an object lesson for the children? What kind of object lesson?

9. In Chapter 8, Grant watches the sixth-grade boys saw and split wood and recalls his own experiences as a student. What do his description and memories reveal about his own character and about life in the quarter over the years?

10. What are the full meaning and implications of "the burden," which Grant recalls as being passed from Matthew Antoine to himself?

11. In Chapter 17, both Paul and Grant say that they will do their duty in respect to Jefferson. Is the importance of doing one's duty a dominant theme of the novel? Does each of the other main characters have a clear notion of his or her duty?

12. In Chapter 22, Grant notes that Jefferson looks at him "with an inner calmness now." What are the causes and implications of that inner calmness?

13. In Chapter 24, Grant explains to Jefferson a "myth" that continues to determine life in their community. What is that "myth"? Are there references to it or instances of its operation elsewhere in the novel?

14. How are the related themes of past-and-present and stasis-and-change bodied forth in the persons and actions of the characters? What is needed to break from the past without incurring alienation or death? Does Gaines resolve the thematic conflict between a respect for the past and the need to change and grow?

15. To what extent is the theme of fathers and sons important? Consider, for example, Grant's relationships with the surrogate fathers, Matthew Antoine and Reverend Ambrose.

Imagery and Language

1. What Cajun and Creole words and idioms are used throughout the novel? With what frequency and in what contexts? What does the use of these words and idioms reveal about the hierarchy and conventions of the novel's social order?

2. When and how does the "hog" metaphor appear in the novel, beginning with its first appearance in Chapter 1? With what purpose and to what effect? Do it and related animal images appear in any association or context other than those directly connected with Jefferson?

3. What images and descriptive elements are associated with the quarter's church-school? How do they establish the church-school within the landscape and history of the quarter, within the lives of the main characters, and within the main action of the novel? What is the impact of the description, in Chapter 31, of the building's foundations?

4. What is the importance in the lives of the black community of such sports heroes as Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis? What connection, if any, exists between references to Robinson and Louis and Grant's definition of the term, hero, in Chapter 24?

5. Are images of the plantation--the river, the cane fields, the trees, the swamp, the cane itself, and so on--emphasized at critical points in the novel? Are they associated with specific characters, themes, and plot developments?

6. On the very first page Miss Emma is likened to "a great stone" and "one of our oak or cypress stumps" and in Chapter 15 Tante Lou is likened to "a boulder in the road." What do these and other instances of strongly rooted or anchored earth elements tell us about these two women? Are similar images associated with other characters?

7. Do the chains that Jefferson is required to wear when out of his cell signify anything beyond Jefferson's situation as a specific, condemned prisoner in this specific jail?

8. What references to clothes occur in the novel? Do these references, taken together, clarify our view of the characters involved, black and white?

9. What does the radio mean for Jefferson and for Grant? Why do Reverend Ambrose and Tante Lou make such an issue of it (in Chapter 23)? What is the radio's significance within the larger context of the novel's action?

10. How, in what contexts, and in association with which characters, does Gaines make use of images of the Messiah or savior? Are these images always connected specifically with Christ or are they presented in more general terms?

11. Upon leaving Pichot's house after discussing Jefferson's impending execution, Grant says to Reverend Ambrose, "I'm going for a walk, a long walk in the opposite direction" [p.159]. Where does this walk take him, actually and symbolically?

Quotations for Discussion and Assignment

What does each of the following quotations reveal about the characters, themes, setting, action, and technique of A Lesson Before Dying?

1. "I was not there, yet I was there." [p. 3: the first sentence of the novel]

2. "Living and teaching on a plantation, you got to know the occupants of every house, and you knew who was home and who was not.... I could look at the smoke rising from each chimney or I could look at the rusted tin roof of each house, and I could tell the lives that went on in each one of them." [pp. 37-38]

3. "Everything you sent me to school for, you're stripping me of it,' I told my aunt.... `The humiliation I had to go through, going into that man's kitchen.... Now going up to that jail.... Anything to humiliate me. All the things you wanted me to escape by going to school. Years ago, Professor Antoine told me that if I stayed here, they were going to break me down to the nigger I was born to be. But he didn't tell me that my aunt would help them do it.'" [p. 79]

4. "I had gone to bars, to barbershops; I had stood on street corners, and I had gone to many suppers there in the quarter. But I had never really listened to what was being said. Then I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, how they talked about the dead and about how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere." [p. 90]

5. "All the furniture in the room was old. Faded overstuffed chairs; an old overstuffed love seat; an overstuffed couch; and a rattan rocker with a pillow. The lamp tables were old, and the lamps and lamp shades looked just as old." [p. 155: referring to the furniture in the big house]

6. "We black men...stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind.... I can give them something that neither a husband, a father, nor a grandfather ever did, so they want to hold on as long as they can. Not realizing that their holding on will break me too." [pp. 166-67]

8. "i kno you paul an i kno ole clark and i kno you too shef guirty and you mr picho and mr mogan an all the rest of yall i jus never say non of this befor but i know yall everlas one of yall" [p. 230]

9. "Yet they must believe. They must believe, if only to free the mind, if not the body. Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free." [p. 251: Reverend Ambrose]

AWARDS

Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction1993 ALA Notable Award1994 YALSA Best Book for Young Adults

"This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives." —Chicago Tribune

OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST

Also by Ernest J. Gaines, available from Vintage Books:

A Gathering of Old Men, Catherine Carmier, In My Father's House, Of Love and Dust, and Bloodline

James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Nobody Knows My NameDavid Bradley: The Chaneysville IncidentClaude Brown: Manchild in the Promised LandAlbert Camus: The StrangerStephen Crane: The MonsterFrederick Douglass: The Life and Times of Frederick DouglassW. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black FolkJohn Ehle: The Journey of August KingRalph Ellison: Invisible Man, Going to the Territory, Shadow and ActFrantz Fanon: Black Skin, White MasksWilliam Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, Light in AugustAlbert French: BillyZora Neale Hurston: Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching GodMartin Luther King, Jr.: "Letter from the Birmingham Jail"Jonathan Kozol: Death at an Early Age, Amazing GraceMalcolm X: The Autobiography of Malcolm XToni Morrison: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Beloved, JazzGloria Naylor: Mama Day, The Women of Brewster PlaceLewis Nordan: Wolf WhistleSister Helen Prejean: Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United StatesTheodore Rosengarten: All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate ShawAlice Walker: The Color PurpleRichard Wright: Black Boy, Eight Men, Native Son.

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

This teacher's guide was written by Hal Hager. Hal Hager taught literature at several colleges for ten years and has been active in editing, marketing, reviewing, and writing about books and writers for more than twenty years.